We all want our food to be safe to eat, the vehicles we drive to be mechanically and technically sound, the medicines we take not to be unduly hazardous to our health… and so forth. But the problem we face is that as society becomes more technological and complex, the less an individual can do to assure that safety, and the abuses of business in the nineteenth and twentieth century have proved rather conclusively that businesses and corporations can’t be trusted to ensure the safety of their products and services, at least not without federal regulations and oversight [and, alas, sometimes not even then].
But beyond what one might call the “understandable” realm of government rules comes yet another level of safety… and that is the regulatory acts and structures we support and pay for as a result of the actions of crazies. To maintain safety from these crazies in a civilized society, we pay a huge premium, and one that shouldn’t, at least in an ideal world, be so necessary. And, yes, I’m among the first to admit we do not live in anything close to an ideal world.
There are the crazies of greed, the scam artists, the ones who try to con money and assets from the gullible and the trusting, and those not intelligent enough to realize they’re being swindled. Another variety of the crazies of greed are the businesses who offshore the production of goods to places where there are no regulations, or very lax ones, on pollution, working conditions, and hazardous chemicals, and while, technically speaking, this practice may “save” us dollars in the cost of goods, it increases the costs and damages on the planet far more than what it “saves” us in lower prices.
Once I believed that it was the product-tampering crazies, those nuts who have injected toxins, poisons, and other harmful substances into foods, medicines, and the like, and who created a billion dollar industry of additional packaging that was totally unnecessary in a sane world… but then I realized that child-proof packaging is also necessary in a world where everything is presented as attractive. Who would ever have thought that detergent pods would resemble candy? But then, maybe that’s another facet of excessive corporate green.
Of course, the emphasis on safety is selective. We still allow sixteen year-olds possession and use of a two thousand pound plus potentially lethal weapon – the automobile – although we do require that the vehicle and operator be licensed and registered, unlike guns, where registration and licensing, in the USA, at least, are violently opposed
But I do find it interesting that the instance of thirty-some poisonings from tampered Tylenol more than twenty-five years ago spurred the eventual requirements of tamper-proof packaging on everything, and there’s not even a requirement for a gun owner to be licensed, when there are over 13,000 gun-related deaths annually in the USA.